Q&A with Kate White

As many of you know, Kate White not only rules the Cosmo offices as editor in chief, but she is also the successful author of three career books and five mysteries! Here, Kate dishes about Lethally Blond, her most recent mystery, available in paperback March 1, 2009.

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One Saturday, several years ago, when my family and I were at our weekend home, my husband and I discovered that our thirteen-year-old son was missing just as it had begun to snow late in the day. We found his footprints just into the woods by our house and then we began frantically to search for him. It seemed as if he had vanished without a trace. Thank God, we found him, lost, hours later, and I realized how utterly horrible it would be to have someone you knew go missing. That inspired the book. In it, a friend of the main character, crime writer Bailey Weggins, asks her to help find a young actor who has disappeared off the face of the earth.

I do feel weirdly attached to Bailey. I feel as if I know her. But I'm not nearly as gutsy as she is. In this book she goes into an abandoned house that smells really bad — as in dead-body bad. As I was writing that scene, part of me was screaming "Don't go in there." But she did anyway.

I'm often inspired by Cosmo. By little moments and snippets. Nothing huge. I don't want someone on staff to sue me, after all — or hate me! But I will put in certain outfits I see a staffer wearing, and definitely overheard phrases."

I had a great ah-ah moment last year. Someone on staff told me a line a friend who's a party animal used as a motto: Go Big or Go Home. I thought that's a great motto to keep in mind for life, for work, for writing. As long you're putting in the energy, go to the max, go for the burn. As I writer I find sometimes I pull my punches a bit, make a scene too quiet. It's helped me to think: Go Big or Go Home.